On 6 August 2012 19:21, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

My personal observation has been that even with a tiny group, an email
containing a list of action items very quickly yields a thread of dozens, or
hundreds of follow-ups - requests for details, Q&A, status updates, nagging,
..... - and sorting through all that info is a real pain and time sink, not
to mention confusing.

Yes, that's what IRC is good for. You get much of the details, Q&A,
and whatnot sorted out in real time before you start writing a
document, and only few revisions are needed to finish then. Also for
status updates that are not obvious as bugs closed or patches pushed.
And if you meant that email is bad for TODO list it definitely is.
Sane people use a text file tracked in vcs with project code or a wiki
page or an issue tracker. Unlike email all these media tend to persist
in the same place and are not pushed away by more recent messages.

Now if that first message was "smarter" - so that responding updated the
original (like editing a wiki page by email) - a lot of the pain and
confusion would go away.

I think google tried something like that with Wave ;-)

Well, yes and no. What was really disappointing about Wave was that it
was closed. It didn't even send email notifications of an update to a Wave.

Note that most wikis are versioned, and some can use a vcs as backend
directly. So more permanent stuff not part of documentation that is
not to be fished in irc logs and mail archives typically ends up on a
wiki or a developer blog.

That nicely captures what I'm trying to accomplish. In a sense, TiddlyWiki
meets Fossil-SCM built on HTML5 and a P2P protocol is kind of what I'm
trying to achieve.

Fossil is almost but not quite such a wiki. It has built in wiki that
is not versioned, and versioned documents that are not editable
through the fossil web UI. If you modified fossil to make the
versioned documents editable you can use the clone and autosync
features to propagate changes.

That's close to what I have in mind. I'm hoping to push the code into
the documents themselves, and store things either in browser storage or
local file systems - making it all a lot more accessible for folks who
don't want to install code.

For a software development team, it makes lots of sense for everyone to
install a copy of Fossil (or whatever). But for an action item list,
it's really a lot easier if everything happens through email and browser
(compose an email, recipient clicks, opens in browser, icon appears on
desktop for future access).

Miles
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra